Welcome to America of the 21st Century! We used to have trees and wildlife until the Republicans showed up for some good 19th century style logging! Wahoo! Lets all vote to make Dubya God-Emperor of America-Ashcroft probably has the papers hidden somewhere!

Come on people, get with it. Who cares about a couple million acres of forest and the survival of a few hundred endangered speices? For God's sake, there's money to be made! Granted, that money is only going to go to a small segment of big-business owners, but via the magic of trickle-down economics, everyone benefits.

AssHull, you seem to have a problem with SLAYERSWINE. That much is obvious. So... What don't you click here and drop him a line. His email is listed there. Or, are you going to just post in threads that he already posted in? Just a thought.

All we need is cows and chicken. Veal, steak, kfc chicken, roast beef sandwiches, cheese from cow boobs, wheat to make bread which is fertalized by cow poop. Were set, kill them all, set fire to the forests, and laugh at the hippies who are burned to death after realizing the folly of their "lets chain ourselves to trees so noone hurts them" ideals.

Yeah, if this stuff is accurate, I've got a really low opinion of this guy.

No, of course we aren't "doomed" if loads of species go extinct. No more so than the art world would collapse if someone torched the Mona Lisa. It's the loss of something utterly irreplacable which makes it so important. You can't go "Hm. Actually, I'd like a few passenger pigeons back, please."

Barring major breakthroughs in Jurassic Park technology, anyway. But even then you have to worry about killer passenger pigeons attacking and eating bit part actors.

"The man chosen to head the Bush administration's wildlife prevention program doubts the existence of ecosystems and says it would not be a crisis if the nation's threatened and endangered species became extinct."

?

Screw this. Given the choice between two utter morons, I should've voted third party. It wouldn't have counted for anything, but at least my conscience would be clean.

'Fitzsimmons says ecosystems exist only in the human imagination and cannot be delineated'-this may actually be true from his point of view. By not taking into account the interactions of all these organisms and the weathers effect on the inorganic habitats, etc. Objectively, there are only a bunch of different organisms that live in their own inorganic habitat(greatly simplified). Even if you did examine all of interactions(which would probably be impossible), the idea of separating out one subset of interactions and saying that it was an ecosytem would be artificially creating a subset when really, the subset in question is actually in whole or part, interacting with other such subsets, adinfinitum. To attempt to delineate a subset as an ecosytem unto itself, is almost like politicians setting arbitrary borders of counties. Except, one county does not overlap any others(idealy). So the politicians view is that there is a 'whole' and that is it.ok end of rant...

yes yeshis Energy Department is only interested in more oilhis Wildlife Department denies the existence of ecosystemshe can't even be an American Man and eat beer and pretzels without falling over.

Department of Homeland Security. Right.

War on Terra.(you know, I like when people mock his Texan accent like that. In this particular case, it makes what he says MORE accurate, considering Terra is another popular name for the Earth. Well, popular in sci-fi, at least, you'll find it in Starcraft, Star Trek, Battletech, the phrase "terra firma"...)

And he is in control of the world's last super power. Doesn't that just give you a warm fuzzy?

Whoops, there goes the surplus, and now the deficit is really in the red! Damn, whodathunkit?

He decided to spend federal funds on vouchers for private schools instead of funding public schools!

Damn, now all we have are penniless (sp?) public schools , and private schools filled with the nations trash! Lets not forget about having all those useless public school teachers out of a job (my mother being one of them).

He decided to fight all the evil terrorists and depose that mean ol' Saddam!

No, no wait. Fighting a faceless enemy is impossible, and Iraq hasn't actually attacked us yet, so the "war on terror" will tank, along with any foriegn policies/agreements we made with countries that feel Saddam is not a threat. Losing the support of Russia would be a huge stab in the butt, as they export a good deal of oil to us.

He decided to appoint a total asshead to take charge of this "logging spree" and turn many of our national forests into mud pits.

"How can a man who doesn't understand ecological systems and community values for wildlife run a program that's supposed to protect forests and communities?" asked John McCarthy, spokesman for the Idaho Conservation League. "People won't have confidence in this guy. He'll be divisive, it will all be based on junk science."

A lot of farkin nerve this asswipe McCarthy has. Most of the environ-mental case movement is based on junk science, the two biggest whoppers being the overhyped dangers and manipulated data of secondhand smoke studies and the sham THEORY called 'global warming.'

And by the way hippies, creatures go extinct ALL THE DAMNED TIME. Though I'd be unhappy to see them die off, if pandas, bald eagles, the butt ugly Calfornia condor, koalas and dolphins all vanished tomorrow NOTHING would collapse except the price of zoo admissions.

America is finished. Too many generations of govt.school brain-washed cookie cutter liberal socialists programmed to recognize all free enterprise as evil and Big Government as the only God and solution. Who are the truly ignorant pessismists and nihilists? Not the Libertarians. Not the few remaining (real) conservatives.

No Skwidd. There were no extinctions until the last 20 years I think. Previously all animals existed in happy coexistence and beautiful symbiosis with each other. Bunnies hopped and played with wolves and cats slept with dogs. No species ever competed with another for food and there was always a place to live without invading the space of another. That's what I've heard.

There's somewhat of a difference between the natural predations of animals on each other, and the rip-roaring deforestation of a nation. I propose that we realise both sides use lies, damned lies, Statistics, and Benjamin Disraeli quotes, and refuse to budge on anything until someone makes sense. Of course this means no burning down trees, and no planting new plants. Wait 'em out. We have the rest of our lives, as it is..

Indiepress:This must be one of Bush's coke buddies that never went clean - the shiat he writes ('ecosystems exist only in the human imagination and cannot be delineated') is fuking nuts

Look at your "quote" again. You just cited the author's paraphrase, not Fitzsimmons himself.

And I wouldn't trust the author to be completely unbiased, especially when considering the way he uses boldface to try to trick the reader into thinking that Fitzsimmons doubts the existance of an ecosystem, when in fact all that the evidence conveys is that he doubts the validity of some people's analysis of ecosystems. He doesn't do a good job of it, either, and that's a further testament to his incompetence. Observe:

Quoting the title of Fitzsimmons' paper:"The Illusion of Ecosystem Management"

Why highlight just the word "ecosystem"? I stopped at this word while I was reading it, wondering why he did that, when I realized that all I had in my head about that line was what I read up to that point: "The Illusion of Ecosystem". But the real subject of the illusion is the management, a human concoction.

Quoting Fitzsimmons' text directly:"By urging the public to make changes in their lives to accommodate nonexistent ecosystem needs, one wonders if the bishops are beginning inadvertently to make an idol out of their own creation, what they call the Columbia Basin ecosystem."

Again, it's not the ecosystem that he claims is non-existant. He's contesting the needs that some people believe are required of it.

And regarding that quote about ecosystems existing only in the human imagination, I refer to Talat32's post above.

I see no evidence that Fitzsimmons doubts the existance of the processes that constitute ecosystems, and I see a lot of evidence showing that the author is trying to drill a false concept into our heads through repetition in boldface precisely because his argument isn't solid enough to stand on its own. I take this argument with a grain of salt.

Schrodinger, nice to hear from you again. Once again, I have to point out that Libertarian thought does not preclude sound management of the environment. It's called 'wise use', as opposed not using it at all. I'm sorry, but nobody can convince me that the six million acres lost to raging wildfires this year was the result of an intelligent approach to forest management. Clear cutting the forests is obviously not an intelligent approach either. It would appear that the end result is about the same. I think that you may be surprised to learn that many Libs realize that there's not much use to having a free market if there's nothing left to sell.

"There are two inherent weaknesses in the ecosystem concept when applied to land use planning: 1) the cartographic manifestation of the idea is unavoidably arbitrary, imprecise and often not representative of the actual landscape; and 2) the concept embraces only a fraction of the information needed to make balanced land use decisions. These fundamental deficiencies leave important questions outstanding. How can a government decision regarding land use be justified on the basis of a pattern of ecosystems that is but one of many possible, yet equally valid, patterns that apply to the same territory? How can a decision be made on the basis of an ecosystem boundary whose location may be little more than an educated guess? How can decisions be predicated chiefly on what is but a fragment of the information needed for balanced decision making?"

"I have a black, a woman, two Jews and a cripple. And we have talent."

Ahh.. doesn't that just take you back? Now we have a new set of right wingnuts poised to wreak havoc on our environement for a buck. Or, if your a Republican, this is just about creating jobs for the average person and the environment can take care of itself, errr.. something like that, yes? It's not really about generating more wealth for the already obscenely wealthy. Right. Ack, this is what happens when I post so late but it's too blasted hot to sleep!